Discuss the View That the Impact of Earthquake Hazards Depends Primarily on Human Factors

Discuss the view that the impact of earthquake hazards depends primarily on human factors (40).

Human factors are anything that affects the severity of an earthquake event that would not happen without human influence- they are man-made. For example, the land use of an area, or population density. Physical factors are the opposite; they would happen with or without humans, for example the location of the hazard or the relief of the land.

The physical factors that affect the impact of an earthquake are obviously very important. The magnitude and the depth of an earthquake play a major part in the damage caused. The larger the magnitude, and the closer the focus is to ground level, the worse the impact will be. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake for example was magnitude 8.0, which is hugely destructive even without a very shallow depth of 19km, which worsened the situation. Due to this, $125bn had to be spent on reconstruction, which would probably have been less if the focus had been deeper, or the magnitude had been smaller. In addition to the size and magnitude, if an earthquake has many strong aftershocks, rescue and recovery efforts will be hindered due to things like damaged infrastructure. This worsens the impacts as it is likely to lead to more deaths and injuries.

Another physical factor that can influence an earthquake’s impacts is the location, or epicentre of it. An earthquake in the middle of a continental plate will have different consequences to one where the epicentre is in the middle ocean. This is because an earthquake that occurs in the water can also cause a tsunami, which will cause flooding and spread waterborne diseases on top of the impacts from the initial earthquake. With this in mind, it is clear that earthquake hazards, even without human factors to influence them, can cause devastating damage. It can then be argued that earthquake events are mostly dependent on physical factors. After all, without the initial movement of the plates, there would be no earthquake, and therefore no impacts.  However, earthquakes of similar magnitude and depth typically have much more detrimental impacts in less developed countries than more developed ones. This shows that human factors do actually have a significant influence and it isn’t just down to physical elements.